nerdy wedding inspiration!

Real Wedding: Shannon & Graham’s subtly nerdy, TARDIS-tastic wedding!

Shannon & Graham’s wedding was sent to me by their awesome photographers over Reddit – sometimes I’m really glad I spend so much time on that site! Not only did they use an incredibly cool venue, but there were all sorts of amazingly personal nerdy touches throughout the wedding. The coolest thing, though, was their homemade, customized TARDIS centerpieces…complete with light-up action! For all more awesome photos of the sweetest pocket watch and some rad favors, click through to the rest of the entry…The Bride: Shannon || 28 || ConsultantThe Groom: Graham || 27.5 || Student, game developer, designerWedding date: August 27th, 2011Wedding location: Calgary, Alberta, Canada

The wedding, in Shannon’s words:“So, we should start with the point that Graham first decided he needed to get his act together and ask me to marry him when I gave him a graduation gift…it was Dr. Who’s Chameleon Arch (the timey-wimey pocket watch).This was after a couple years of Graham’s methodical geek training coming to fruition. See, he had me on a strict diet (Graham says ‘gentle persuasion’) of FireFly, Farscape, Babylon 5 and CIV, to initiate me into the geekdom. I have to say I rather enjoyed it.

We wanted to have our wedding at a place where people could enjoy the afternoon, as we had out of town guests, as well as [where] we could get really awesome pics. We also can get into nature show marathons (we recommend ‘LIFE’) so it was a natural choice for us to decide on the zoo for our wedding location. We did not want to have a safari themed wedding, however we couldn’t ignore the fact that we had giraffes outside our patio at the reception either, so we opted for animal themed favors…LEGO! Graham and I spent many hours on a LEGO creation program coming up with our own designs of animals to have a variety at each table. We ordered the LEGOs en mass from ‘pick a brick’ and a couple trips to the LEGO store to fill our buckets. It was a lot of fun to make all the animals to make sure we got all the pieces right and weren’t missing anything. Of course, for the actual favors we only supplied our guests with a picture of what is SHOULD have looked like, and let them go nuts. It was a great conversation starter.Graham was surprised, and convinced that he had made the right choice in marrying me, when I came up with the idea of having TARDIS centerpieces. The idea was to have them on half the tables, flowers on the other half, it worked really well. Graham made the TARDIS’s from scratch [Ed. Note: DIY tutorial from Graham coming soon!] and we put lights into them so as the room got darker they would flicker and added great ambiance to the room. We had previously decided to give them away to certain people who had been a part of our wedding and making the day special, but if we had extra’s we would have sold them from the tables! Everyone was asking where we got them and was super surprised to learn that my computer scientist husband was handy too! Graham had a couple things that he made sure to wear that day, obviously one was his Dr’Who pocket watch which we had to order in a chain for. We couldn’t find a tux vest to rent with a pocket, so we bought one just to get a pocket sewed in so that Graham could wear his watch. We have some awesome pics of Graham trying to read his pocket watch and standing next to a giant sundial…I’m still glad his Best Man was there to get him to the wedding on time. The second thing Graham was sure to wear was the Batman cuff-links that I had gotten him the previous Christmas. They were awesome. We can go no further without talking about music. We were so very lucky to know a very talented pianist whom I begged to have play at our wedding, as I could imagine no one else. He played out ceremony music and our dinner music all to our specifications and did a marvelous job, it really made our day! After saying our ‘I do’s’ we retreated back up the aisle to ‘Baba Yetu by Christopher Tin’ which happens to be the opening music to Civ4 and the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili. It was a perfect way to start our journey. Our dinner music was a gentle mix of anything from traditional favorite love songs to epic game music to Tetris. To top all that off we danced and awesome first dance to the Beatles, ‘When I’m 64’. All in all, we never set out to have a nerdy wedding, but our interested and like obviously came through in fun a different ways that we would have never changed out for anything different. Everyone will remember our wedding and the ‘crazy’ things we did, but it was ours.”

Do you have any advice for couples planning a nerdy wedding?:“I don’t think our wedding would have been as much fun if we had set out to make it a geek wedding, instead we wanted to make it a reflection of who we are and our geekiness just shone through. You could see my personality show through with my bridesmaids different colored dresses to Grahams ideas to pose with dinosaurs in the background of our wedding shots. We never focused on just one thing, but instead brought in a bunch of different ideas and it ended up being really fun. I wont lie, we sure got some weird looks from our friends and family whenever we told them of our ideas, but Graham and I made it work, and we got tons of great compliments on what we did. Our advice is to not be afraid of mixing TARDIS centerpieces with LEGO and batman quirks, it will work because it is all stuff that you value to be part of your day.”

Thank you again to Abby + Dave for submitting this amazing wedding, and to Shannon & Graham for being so helpful! Your wedding was gorgeous and you guys are awesome. To see the rest of the photos from Shannon & Graham’s wedding, check out Abby + Dave’s blog post.